50th Anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act: Rise/Fall of the OSCE

Half a century ago, in late July 1975, the leaders of 33 European states, along with those of the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union, met in Helsinki. Their task was to conclude the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)—a process that had begun two years earlier and aimed to ease the tense relations between the capitalist West and the socialist East.

The main outcome of the CSCE was the so-called Helsinki Final Act – an agreement that, although not legally binding, addressed a number of urgent issues divided into three “baskets”: political and military affairs; economic and scientific cooperation; and human rights.

The Soviet leadership welcomed the Final Act, as it affirmed the inviolability of Europe's existing borders—something they interpreted as a de facto legitimization of their territorial gains after World War II. Western leaders, while reiterating their non-recognition of the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic states, allowed this ambiguity.

The "consolation prize" for the West was the inclusion in the Final Act of the third "basket" of human rights and fundamental freedoms as essential for peaceful coexistence in Europe.

With certain reservations, the Final Act helped ease Cold War tensions and lay the foundations for international order in Europe.

However, it was clear from the outset that the Soviet leadership would not honor its own commitments under the third "basket." Although the signing of the Final Act energized human rights groups and national liberation movements within the Soviet Union—which were based on its principles of equal rights and self-determination of peoples—the Soviet authorities brutally repressed them, effectively sabotaging key elements of the CSCE agreement.

This was not surprising: the Soviets were primarily interested in the first "basket," the political-military one, which they interpreted as legitimizing and reinforcing the Soviet sphere of geopolitical influence.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CSCE was rebranded as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1995. The Final Act's "baskets" were renamed dimensions, and the third "basket" became the human dimension, which would include election observation, the protection of national minorities, freedom of the press, and broader issues related to the rule of law and democratic governance.

From transition to tension

After Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the country's relations with the OSCE began to deteriorate.

Russia's gradual descent from a weak democracy to a consolidated authoritarianism, marked by the erosion of human rights, media freedom, and electoral norms, has drawn increasing criticism from the OSCE. In response, Moscow has begun to echo the long-standing Soviet stance of downplaying the human dimension and emphasizing the primacy of political and military concerns outlined in the first "basket" of the Final Act.

Russia had the procedural tools to do so. Because the OSCE operates primarily by consensus, Moscow's ability to refuse agreements repeatedly paralyzed the organization's initiatives that it considered contrary to its geopolitical interests.

However, with the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Putin's Russia went even further than the Soviet Union – not only in terms of military aggression against a European country, but also in its approach to the OSCE.

While the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia under Boris Yeltsin, at least formally, pretended to respect the Final Act's human rights commitments, the Putin regime increasingly rejected them as "Westernist" and incompatible with national sovereignty.

Accusations of Western bias and double standards have become a recurring theme in Russian statements at OSCE meetings. Moscow has systematically exploited the OSCE's consensus-based decision-making process to undermine the organization's entire human dimension.

Russia's refusal to agree to key decisions has suspended the OSCE's annual conference on human rights, blocked mandates and funding for field missions focused on civil society and human rights, and paralyzed the organization's own mechanisms for investigating serious violations—unless such efforts are aligned with the Kremlin's geopolitical interests.

From sabotage to impasse

But while Russia systematically blocked the OSCE's human rights agenda in favor of an exclusive focus on hard security issues, it simultaneously worked to hollow out the Organization's political and military dimensions as well.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014, OSCE participating states pushed for monitoring of the Russian-Ukrainian border to determine whether Russia was sending weapons or troops into Ukrainian territory. However, the technical mandate and geographic scope of the OSCE observation mission, which Russia accepted, made it physically impossible to monitor the wider border area where military transfers were suspected.

Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow refused to allow any OSCE presence along the new front lines. Russia also blocked the extension of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, effectively preventing the organization from monitoring the conflict.

Like the overwhelming majority of international organizations created in the last century to reduce geopolitical tensions and shift the balance of international relations toward peaceful coexistence and cooperation, the OSCE now finds itself in a terminal existential crisis. The Helsinki Final Act, a landmark Cold War era landmark, belongs to an international order that no longer exists—just like the OSCE.

Along with the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, and many other institutions that have lost their coherence and purpose in the current interregnum, the OSCE will continue to exist through institutional inertia – and as a memorial to the historical era of relative stability in Europe.

As such, it remains irreplaceable, if only because the new international order has not yet emerged.